that shack was Thornton,
only half dressed, stretching himself in the sun, and LAUGHING. There
wasn't anything to laugh at, but we could see his teeth shining white,
and he grinned every minute while he went through a sort of setting-up
exercise.

When you begin to analyze a man, there is always some one human trait
that rises above all others, and that laugh was Thornton's. Even the
wolfish sledge-dogs at the post would wag their tails when they heard
it.

We soon established friendly relations, but I could not get very far
beyond the laugh. Indeed, Thornton was a mystery. DeBar, the factor,
said that he had dropped into the post six months before, with a pack
on his back and a rifle over his shoulder. He had no business,
apparently. He was not a propectory and it was only now and then that
he used his rifle, and then only to shoot at marks.

One thing puzzled DeBar more than all else. Thornton worked like three
men about the post, cutting winter fire-wood, helping to catch and
clean the tons of whitefish which were stored away for the dogs in the
company's ice-houses, and doing other things without end. For this he
refused all payment except his rations.

Scotty continued eastward to Churchill, and for seven weeks I bunked
with Thornton in the shack. At the end of those seven weeks I knew
little more about Thornton than at the beginning. I never had a closer
or more congenial chum, and yet in his conversation he never got beyond
the big woods, the mountains, and the tangled swamps. He was educated
and a gentleman, and I knew that in spite of his brown face and arms,
his hard muscles and splendid health, he was three-quarters tenderfoot.
But he loved the wilderness.

"I never knew what life could hold for a man until I came up here," he
said to me one day, his gray eyes dancing in the light of a glorious
sunset.

"I'm ten years younger than I was two years ago."

"You've been two years in the north?"

"A year and ten months," he replied.

Something brought to my lips the words that I had forced back a score
of times.

"What brought you up here, Thornton?"

"Two things," he said quietly, "a woman--and a scoundrel."

He said no more, and I did not press the matter. There was a strange
tremble in his voice, something that I took to be a note of sadness;
but when he turned from the sunset to me his eyes were filled with a
yet stranger joy, and his big boyish laugh rang out with such wholesome
infectiousne